As many of you have already discovered, IE8 has some great features to help your users in working with the information that most interests them on the Web. One feature hopefully all of you are familiar with is Web Slices.
Web Slices is a new feature which enables users to connect to a website by subscribing to content directly within a page on that site. Web Slices behave just like feeds; users can subscribe to get updates and notifications of changes.
The Web Slice itself uses simple, semantic HTML markup to represent a portion of a Web page that visitors can subscribe to. You can apply annotations directly to content within the HTML page. You can use additional files for optimization. --These are optional. In a nutshell, web slices have four components, Discovery, Update, Preview, and Navigation.
- Discovery: For Internet Explorer to detect a Web Slice, the Web page must be served from a Web server. A user can see them either by mousing over them or clicking on the feeds button in IE 8. There are also several other methods for discovery located here: IE8 Web Slices and Discoverability
- Update: By default, Internet Explorer uses the suggested update interval specified by the Web Slice publisher in the ttl property element, if such an element exists; otherwise, updates follow the default feed interval, normally every 24 hours. The user can adjust these timings, as well.
- Preview: To view a Web Slice, click its button on the Favorites bar. The preview window, also called the flyout, displays the locally cached content of the Web Slice, or an Alternative Display Source, if one has been defined by the publisher.
- Navigation: To quickly access the full Web page, click the Open button in the preview window. By default, Internet Explorer returns to where a particular Web Slice was discovered; the publisher can modify this behavior through the bookmark property.
Learn how you can write your own web slices for your own web site here: Subscribing to Content with Web Slices
The great thing about web slices is that anyone can write them and literally any website can leverage them. You can see more here: http://ieaddons.com/en/webslices/
If you are a fan of country music, you probably have heard of Dolly Parton, who is one of the most-honored female country performers of all time. Well, Dolly Parton even has a great web slice for her web site: www.dollypartonmusic.net. One of my teammates, Jon Box (http://blogs.msdn.com/jonbox/default.aspx), helped work with Dolly's team to make the web slice happen. Her web slice is a 3 tab web slice with options of:
· Video Diary – see Dolly’s latest thoughts on video, with the beauty of Silverlight
· News – see the latest news, fan club announcements, and Dollyisms (like "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”)
· Buy Now – view the latest deal from Dolly’s online store, Trinkets & Treasures
Also, Dolly has created a video to talk about IE8 web slices. This is a must see!! Her southern charm comes through with warm and light hearted comments about Microsoft, IE8, and web slices. There will be several new Dollyism’s that come from this video. I would love to quote some of this, but we don’t want to spoil your upcoming laugh.
So download the web slice today: the Dolly page in the IE8 gallery or www.dollypartonmusic.net.